Using Kinect for Windows v1

[banjo]

Hi!

Great project, would very much like to try this out. Is there a way to use the Kinect for Windows (v1) on a Windows 8 computer?

Does OpenNI work with this sensor? or is there another way to use the regular K4W driver?

Sorry for the beginner's questions, have mostly been using Kinect in a Windows development environment...

//Anders

[m.omar82]

hi
from the tutorial https://code.google.com/p/rtabmap/wiki/Installation#Windows
it can work with openNi
please if your test it shear your experiments
goood luck with windows & kinect

[matlabbe]

Kinect for Windows is different from the Kinect for XBOX 360. On Windows, maybe the Microsoft Kinect SDK could be used to acquire the images, making a driver in CameraRGBD source file.

Here another answer that may help:
"The only experience I had with the K4W is that it didn't work out-of-the-box with ROS, then we used Kinect for Xbox 360 or Xtion instead. However, we still have a K4W here, so I just tested it with the instructions here: http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2012/06/k4w-testing.html and the demos work. I have built rtabmap with this modified libfreenect library and it works (with a minor change that I just commited). Maybe you will need to rebuild the freenect_launch ros package (http://wiki.ros.org/freenect_launch) with the libfreenect built with the link above. "

You could check to make it run with freenect under Windows, then no code change would be required in rtabmap.

[banjo]

Hi! Thanks for your tips and pointers, I started looking into your code but then I tried again with OpenNI and I finally had success with the following setup and installation sequence:

Windows 8.1, 64-bit
Microsoft Kinect SDK v1.8 with dependencies
Uninstalled Kinect driver and removed driver files.
OpenNI-win64-1.5.4.0-dev
Sensor-win64-5.1.2.1-redist
SensorKinect093-bin-win64-5.1.2.1

One more thing, I have a little bit of an issue loading meshes (PLY files) to a decent viewer, tried Meshlab and got 31M vertices but 0 faces. Is this an issue with my data or is there another viewer that you recommend using instead?

Looking forward to proceeding with this by mounting my Kinect to my robotic chassis!

//Anders

[matlabbe]

By default RTAB-Map exports only the points (not the polygons). To export a mesh, the option "Meshing using GP3..." in the Export dialog must be checked (older RTAB-Map versions have this parameter in Preferences->3DRendering). However, the mesh generation is pretty basic (using the PCL approach described here). You may want to generate yourself the mesh from the point cloud.

I put some screenshots here:





The last screenshot is with the option MLS post-processing checked to smooth the surface before meshing. See this PCL tutorial about smoothing.